Business Blog

There comes a time in a person’s life when they need to get away. Vacations are crucial for the well being of a persons mind. If you’ve been attempting to plan a vacation, then you’ve probably noticed all of the options that are available.

One popular choice is often overlooked because some people think it will be expensive or limited; this is a time share. However, time shares are a great way to get away and rid you of stress. They provide you with a carefree vacation! Having a time share in one of the most traveled locations can be a dream come true. This article is going to cover some of those locations.

Time shares have been around for a long time and often people will hang on to their time share for a decade or more. This is because they allow you to visit the places you love without having to make the same plans time and time again. There are several places in the world that are among the most popular.

Owning a time share property in Florida is probably one of the most popular. Florida’s coastlines are littered with time share resorts! The state is popular for its weather and beaches, making it an obvious choice for vacationing families. How about an Orlando time share? You’ll find vacation timeshare locations from Daytona Beach all the way down to Key West!

Hawaii has been one of the most visited states in America for a long time, so it is no wonder why owning a time share in Hawaii is growing in popularity. The islands are known for their resorts and tropical escapes for families and couples making this a popular spot for time shares.

In Hawaii you can get the best of both worlds as a time share owner. You can take advantage of the beach resorts with activities such as snorkeling and swimming, or you can purchase something a bit quieter, like a cottage on the beach.

Owning a time share in Florida or Hawaii aren’t your only options. Aruba time share and other Caribbean locations, such as the Bahamas, are becoming more popular for those who are seeking a tropical paradise. For those time share owners who are looking for an adventure, there are resorts offered in different locations throughout Europe as well. A timeshare rental is a great way to save your money and get that vacation you need, whether it’s a European adventure or a lazy time on a Florida beach!

Shared Ownership Mortgages and affordable housing schemes are helping people to get onto the property ladder.

As the country enters a severe housing slump, shared ownership mortgages are aiding people to overcome the problems facing those trying to get onto the property ladder.

The Problem with the Housing Market

We have been experiencing a housing boom, where buy-to-lets were rife and everyone was trying their hand at property development. People were making money hand over fist at a time when the value of a property was going well over what it was actually worth. The average individual could not afford to buy, so many looked at 100% mortgages or even 125% mortgages, borrowing more than they could really afford.

We created a credit culture of people borrowing to afford instead of working out what they could afford before taking out credit.

The back lash of the credit culture has created the ‘credit crunch’ that we are all experiencing, so those who bought a year ago are now looking at a house that has depreciated by as much as £50,000 in 12 months. Mortgage rates have gone up and home repossession have also gone up by 24% in 12 months.

With house prices coming down all around us, the market is said to be a ‘buyers market’, but these buyers need to have a decent deposit in order to get these deals/ steals on the housing market. A decent deposit is 10% and this does not include all of the fees that go with it, and with the average house now costing £180,000 you are going to be looking at the best part of £25,000.

First time buyers have been priced out of the market for a number of years, but the current situation is making it almost impossible for everyday first time buyers to make the leap from mum and dad’s or rented accommodation into home ownership.

How can I get into the property ladder ?

If you don’t have a huge deposit or have recently landed a wind fall, then you might want to look at shared ownership.

Shared ownership, as the name describes, allow you to share the ownership of a property. This is usually done through the housing association where you buy part of the house and rent the other share.

The share that you take in your shared ownership scheme depends entirely upon the type of scheme and how much you can afford. The amount usually comes to either a more than renting the property would be or around the same amount.

Shared Ownership has been opened up to all first time buyers who earn under £60,000 a year as well as key workers, who the shared ownership scheme was originally designed for. Shared ownership is now opening up the possibilities for everyone trying to buy in the current market.

How can I get a shared ownership mortgage?

The first step is to contact your local housing association who will advise you of the options in your area and the schemes that are available to you.

Next you can start to look for properties, or perhaps you are lucky enough to be able to buy the property that you are renting, and look at getting yourself a mortgage.

It is important that your shared ownership mortgage fits you and not the other way around. You need to make sure that the mortgage will work with your situation, so make sure that you shop around or speak to a mortgage broker who can advise you correctly.

SSON: Can we have a bit of background, Steve? Tell us about how the HMPS journey began and how you got involved.

Steve Hodgson: I joined HMPS in 2005 to establish a shared service for them, which is how and when I became involved. The Prison Service had a program to transform its support functions (HR, procurement and finance functions); this program was set up with shared services and an ERP solution at its heart with a go-live date of April 2006. Its objectives were to improve the service, and to reduce the cost of the service, whilst also enabling improved performance in its mainstream business through better control systems, and better management information. That was the objective.

SSON: Who had ownership of this program – where was the impetus for change coming from?

SH: In particular, the board of the Prison Service. Obviously the functional directors – the finance director, the procurement director, the HR director – had a particular interest in their own areas, but they all needed a similar capability which was a shared service and the IT that underpinned it.

SSON: What’s the governance structure?

SH: If I tell you the history of it, it’ll make more sense! Although it was originally conceived as a shared service for the Prison Service, during 2006 we agreed that we would begin to deliver services for the Home Office, which is a separate government department now. That went live in February this year. That puts some context on your question about how it’s governed. It’s a cost centre within the Prison Service and it’s part of the finance function – that’s just somewhere for it to reside really. We have a Service Level Agreement with the customers – so one with the Prison Service and one with the Home Office – and alongside that SLA, which defines the services and the standards to which they’ll be delivered, there is a budget allocation to cover the cost of it. So the service and cost are governed through that process.

The processes are aligned through what we call a policy gateway; so for example how we transact HR transactions, is aligned with HR policy, and there’s a similar set-up for finance and procurement. That’s the point at which we discuss with the policy owners, or agree with the policy owners in the business, any change in process which impacts on policy, and where any change in policy which impacts on process is brokered.

SSON: What’s your role? Whereabouts do you fit in that process?

SH: I’m the Head of Shared Service, so I’m responsible for running the shared service operation. I report to the finance director in the Prison Service, but I also report to a steering board made up of board members from the Prison Service and board members from the Home Office. The steering board is the overarching governance.

SSON: Where are you based and how many employees do you have currently?

SH: In shared services we currently have somewhere in the order of 800 employees. Of those approximately 500 are based in Newport in South Wales, which is the shared service centre, and of those 500 just under 400 are at work in the Prison Service account and just over 100 – rising to 240 by the end of this year – deal with the Home Office account. We also run a prison service training college in a place called Newbold Revel, near Rugby, and that is a big training centre where predominantly we train new prison officers; there are about 100 employees there.

Then the rest of the staff are based in one of the following three operations: field-based teams, which is where the recruiters are (we recruit people out across the UK; we don’t keep recruiters in the SSC, they’re geographically based); regionally-based trainers, to deliver training where it needs to be delivered close to the point of use; and we have a number of purchasing teams who do low-value high-volume transactions for things which cannot be bought from catalogue. We run i-procurement so the vast majority of transactions go through self-service, but if you can’t get it on a catalogue and you can’t use your purchasing card you can raise a non-catalogue requisition, which is a manual transaction. We do those.

SSON: Were these installations built to order or did you occupy existing sites?

SH: The Newport one was a brand-new empty building which we kitted out, so it actually looks like a SSC. The one in Rugby looks like a cross between a stately home and a teaching college. I think there’s a hundred bedrooms – it’s something which you wouldn’t commonly find in shared services. It’s not unique but it’s unusual.

SSON: Turning to the Shared Services Excellence Awards: you won Best New Shared Services Operation of the Year 2008. What was it, do you think, that set you apart from your competitors?

SH: I think there are a couple of things really. One is the scale and pace of the change – we’ve gone from no shared service to a multi-customer, multi-service-line shared service in less than two years – at scale, so we service 75,000 employees across the Prison Service and the Home Office. I think the second one was probably the maturity of some of our practices; we already have quite a lot of automation self-service; we’ve used, since we started, Six Sigma process improvement. I think those are probably the two main reasons.

SSON: To what extent has your personal experience been a key factor in these endeavours?

SH: For me this is the third one of these that I’ve done at any scale, which obviously helps: you know what you want it to look like when you start out, so you have the end in mind from the beginning.

SSON: To do all this in two years is impressive: was that the rate which you had in mind from the start?

SH: The Prison Service had the ambition to do it at that pace. What it didn’t have was the ambition to take that second customer. So that’s the kind of ‘exceeded expectation’ element of it. The reason for doing that was that it’s reduced the Prison Service operating costs by over £2m [$4m] a year because the overhead is spread over a much wider user-base.

SSON: What kind of benchmarking have you done to measure achievement and how successful have you been in hitting your targets?

SH: We’ve benchmarked the services using PWC, so we used the PWC Saratoga benchmarks. We’ve found that in some areas we’re already upper-quartile, and in most areas we are median or better.

SSON: And how long did it take to get there?

SH: We did the benchmarking at the end of last year. The SSO was designed from the outset to run at pretty much the performance levels we’re at right now.

SSON: What have been the biggest challenges you’ve had to overcome? Obviously taking on that second customer has been a huge one…

SH: I think the biggest challenge is business change. Clearly creating one of these things, going from no people to 500 people, all trained and knowing what they’re doing; implementing pretty much a complete Oracle IT system, is tricky. But the hardest bit is business change: getting 130 jails in England and Wales – 50,000 people – to change the way they do things. For example they’ve gone from everything being paper-based and done locally, to increasing amounts of self-service all done from Wales, no local contact, in just under two years. So that’s been a tremendous change for them. And then I guess the third thing is dealing with the things that go wrong: unknown IT, unknown processes, it’s all unproven so things go wrong. Sometimes things happen that you wouldn’t expect would happen: sometimes you have too few people, the IT system doesn’t behave – all those things which are euphemistically referred to as teething problems.

SSON: Has the resistance among general staff more or less been overcome now, or is there still some way to go do you think?

SH: I think there’s still some resistance. I think the approach to what’s seen as resistance is important. We haven’t necessarily always designed a service solution which works for them. And the good news is that they’ll very soon tell you it doesn’t work, and if you change it they’ll cooperate with you. Now a lot of the services they now receive, they’ll say are better. Some were not as good when we initially implemented them, but since then we’ve used process improvements and enhancements in technology to improve those services, so we’ve filled the gaps pretty quickly.

I think that’s what takes them with you. Talk to the average prison officer and say “I run shared services: what do you want from me?” and they’ll say they want to be paid on time, they want their expenses on time, and correctly. Anything else? “Perhaps some training.” This is not rocket science! If you speak to the governors, who run the jails, or the finance people or the HR people, they’ve got a much more sophisticated list of things they want, so they’re much more difficult to satisfy. It’s usually in that area that the battle is won or lost.

SSON: Where are you hoping to go over the next couple of years?

SH: I think if you’re going to run one of these with the workforce based in the UK, with civil service terms and conditions of employment, you have to achieve very high levels of productivity, because otherwise you’re not cost-effective. Our strategy is one of growth: the more users we can put on our systems, the more transactions we can put through this building: that brings unit-costs down. So we’re embarked on a strategy of growth which is what the Home Office project was all about really.

We’re currently preparing a business case to deliver some more service into the Ministry of Justice, and we’re hopeful that’ll get approval later on this year. We have the option of delivering a broader range of services to the same customer base – there’s still some administration activity that goes on in jails for example that would respond to the application of a shared service. So that’s where we’re headed.

SSON: Finally, what advice could you give to someone just embarking upon planning and implementing a large-scale shared service operation in the public sector as you have?

SH: Make sure you’ve got a team around you that knows how to do it. This is not something that should be a journey of discovery: it takes too long and it costs too much money. Set off with a clear vision and a capable team around you that already know how to do this. If you can sort that out, then you’ll probably do ok.

Understanding stocks and shares is not a difficult job if you don’t get too overly technical and just look for the stock market basics. Stocks are nothing more than purchasing a little piece of a business. When owners of a business need to raise money, they have several options. The first is the normal one, borrow money from a lending institution. The second one is to issue bonds. A bond pays a specific interest rate to those that purchase them. There’s a date when it comes due and the company pays the loan in full. The third option is to go public with stock.

When a company goes public, it issues stock. The company creates a specific amount of shares, we’ll keep it simple and use the number 1,000,000. Everyone that buys a share of stock from the company when they do the initial public offering (IPO) just purchased 1/1,000,000 of the company. Even though it sells many shares, it keeps some stock back for itself. Understanding stocks and shares is a matter of knowing that a single stock is one share of all those that the company issued.

Understanding stocks and shares also involves their purchase and sale. You can buy shares directly through many companies on a systematic basis. This saves brokerage fees. If you sell shares, you also can do that through the company direct. The problem when you do both is that you never know what price you’ll get until the close of the stock market since share trading doesn’t take place until then when you go direct.

Most people get involved in trading stock as a form of investing and want to make the maximum return on their money. You need a brokerage account to do that. You don’t need a broker if you have some understanding of stocks and shares. To provide you with that information, here’s a some stock market for beginners basics.

1. Select the stock you want to purchase. After you open a brokerage account, get a basic understanding of the type of stock, and shares you want, be on the look out for three or four companies you know and whose products you really like.

2. Check the background of the companies and their management. Read every article you can.

3. Find the symbol of the companies and track the stock. You’ll probably start to see a pattern after a few weeks.

4. Decide the type of investor you want to become. It’s not enough to simply have an understanding of stocks and shares, you need to know how you’re going to invest. Decide whether you want to buy and hold. This type of investing comes when you believe that over time, the company will grow. You can also buy and trade rapidly. This is day trading and is used to make money on the patterns of price fluctuations.

Understanding stocks and shares is time consuming at first if you jump in with both feet, but once you follow stocks for a few weeks, you’ll start to see how simple it really is.

The historic falls in the value of Australian equities through 2008 have left investors extremely weary.  Many are asking questions like:  How far will the market fall? When will the falls end? Should I get out? Etc.

I would love to be able to provide the answers for investors but the reality is that I along with every other “expert” really have no clue.

The truth is that no one can provide any definitive answer which unfortunately only helps to add fuel to the fear.  Our approach is to look at the fundamentals of investment markets through history and promote a cautious approach to investing using whole of market style trusts – See our Building Portfolios page for more detail.

Unfortunately the great amount of fear being experienced in markets brings out some less than scrupulous characters.  A few weeks ago I received an unsolicited offer from a group called Hassle Free Share Sales.  This generous organisation offered to buy my Woolworths shares from me.

(As an aside, some may ask why I hold shares when I promote a passive investment approach to investing.  These shares were the first shares I ever owned and were purchased in Woolworth’s IPO in 1993 – so they have some sentimental value along with some significant capital gains implications if I were to sell them.)

Back to Hassle Free Share Sales – they offered to buy the shares for $14.45.  The market price at the time was $28.90.  It is now $26.08 – Friday’s closing price.  They also stated that there would be no brokerage or stamp duty.

Thanks very much but no thanks!!!

What groups like Hassle Free Share Sales and others (including probably the most famous operator – David Tweed) are trying to do is prey on smaller investors who may be less sophisticated in their approach to share ownership.  These investors are the most vulnerable at current times.  They hear, and read all the fear thanks to the media but are less likely to have a financial advisor or even broker assisting them in their decision making.  This offer comes along and it seems an easy way of selling their shares.

Please don’t do it!!!

If you feel you can not take the stress that you might be feeling at the moment and / or you feel you have to sell than you should take the time to get proper advice and sell your shares on the market at the best price you can, not through a shonky operator like this.

For more information on this topic take a look at the following links:

- NSW Government Office of Fair Trading warning in December 2007 about Hassle Free Share Sales – Be wary of share buying offers
- A recent article from Vanguard on the topic – Taking cruel advantage in a troubled market
- ASIC’s Financial tips and safety checks site – FIDO – Unexpected offers to buy your shares
- David Tweed’s Wikipedia entry – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Tweed

Regards,

Scott Keefer
Financial Advisor based in Brisbane, Australia

There are many special moment in life that you want to remember forever. Your wedding day; the birth of a child; a child’s first day of school; and graduation day are a few examples. Using online photo sharing stories is a creative way to capture the moment forever.

Online photo sharing stories are the stories that are written to explain the scene in a photo that is posted. These two elements-the picture and the story-work together to capture the moment. Your online photo sharing stories take your most precious moments in life and allow you to preserve them forever. Sharing these stories online also allows you to make them available to the world or to just a select group of people that you decide to share with.

When you share your special moments with others it increases the joy and happiness created by those moments exponentially. Life is full of peaks and valleys and when a person is in a low spot they can be lifted up by taking a moment to get outside of their own issues and experience a joyful moment through someone else’s eyes. This offers a reminder that there is good in the world and may give hope to someone who has almost given up. It may even remind them of their own special moments in life and give them the strength to look forward onto brighter days. Sharing joy with others is a great service to the world because they can never be too much goodness going around. People are constantly bombarded with news stories of what is wrong in the world and they need reminders of what is right to help create a healthy balance.

Sharing your photos and stories through online photo sharing stories is so much more powerful than sharing them in a scrapbook. You can reach so many more people and give so much more joy. In addition to that you get the security of knowing that your stories and photos are safe from harm. Online they can be backed up in several places to ensure that your memories are never destroyed. House fires, floods and other disasters will not be able to destroy your precious memories when they created in online photo sharing stories. That gives you peace of mind and allows your stories to continue to inspire for many years to come.

Life’s special moments are more special when they are shared with others. Creating online photo sharing stories helps you capture these special moments and preserve them for future generations. Imagine your great-great grandchildren being able to look back and really get a sense of where they came from. Your online photo sharing stories can create a legacy that will extend well into the future and provide joy and understanding for the rest of the ages.

Special moments are captured forever when you create online photo sharing stories and share them with the world. Making the world a happier and more positive place is a great bonus that will bring you even more joy and happiness from sharing your online photo stories.

With all the doom and gloom over housing market, you might be surprised to know that this is a fantastic time to buy a house via a Shared Ownership & Shared Equity scheme. Even if you have bad credit. You can get a great mortgage deal with the following lenders……

Let’s look at a few high street lenders and an adverse (bad credit) lender that have shared ownership mortgage and shared equity mortgage deals available in today’s market.

Abbey are very selective in which developers they have on there approved panel. There rates and fees are similar to the two below, but if your developer is not on the panel then you have no option but to try another lender.

Nationwide accept every developer. They also allow brokers to reserve the rates immediately. Now that may not sound like a big deal but in todays fast pace ever changing mortgage market that is crucial. There tracker rates for shared ownership and shared equity mortgages are competitive, if you are prepared to take a risk on an ever fluctuating Bank of England base rate. 

Halifax this is the lender that likes to say yes, they have some of the most competitive mortgage products available. Each application is assessed on an individual basis, this formed around property type and location, employment and ongoing commitments and credit history.

You still need to put a minimum 10% deposit down dependent on credit score for shared ownership purchases. For shared equity mortgages you can secure a 100% mortgage for your share.

100% Bad credit mortgage lender but ONLY for Shared Ownership purchases. Yes there is still one out there but no widely know to the public. They assess each and every case based on its individual merits. It’s based around affordability and your ability to pay the mortgage. The main criteria is base upon your ability to maintain the loan, if your gross income is over £25,000 50% of your net monthly income is calculated towards your monthly mortgage payment and rental commitment reducing to 45% for income that are less than £25,000. This Shared Ownership mortgage product is a LIBOR rated tracker product. Currently you must not have any more than three de-merits (County Court Judgments, Defaults, and Late payments)
It clearly going to be very difficult for some people to save for a deposit when times are hard and saving seems impossible.

100% mortgages for properties for sale on the open market are the last thing on lenders minds whilst the money markets are still contracting. Maybe a Shared Ownership property purchased through a housing association or a new build shared equity house is for you.

People would always love to capture their moments particularly when the moments are worth remembering. Such memorable moments are captured in the form of photographs and cherished for ever. Apparently, a photograph may be still and lifeless but it communicates a lot to the one for whom it is meant.

Moments pass away but technology has brought about a means to help remember the passed moments and go back to them via photographs. Technology has even helped us to share such captured moments with friends and dear ones. This has become possible only because of photo sharing software application. This software helps in distributing photographs with others who may be anywhere on this earth. This purpose can be realised only with the contribution of the Internet. There are many on line sites that facilitate sharing of photographs and an aspirant can easily find any information regarding photo sharing with the aid of the search engines.

The websites that facilitate individuals to share photos also help in collecting and organising the photographs. This way one can share any number of photographs with any number of people. Besides the Internet the other important component is the digital camera that is required for this purpose. One has got to connect ones camera with the PC only then the photographs captured on the camera can be transferred to the PC and then can be shared with friends having compatible device. One has also got to create ones profile on the online photo sharing site only after that one can upload the photographs that one has saved. Moreover, the individual must give the netizens the access to those photographs. Photo sharing has become so easy and simplified only because of the photo sharing on line sites and these sites have made individuals living far away from dear ones keep in touch.

Moreover, there is a category of people who are really talented for capturing exceptionally good photographs. This class of individuals may also think of making money out of these photographs taken by them. In fact, such people can realise this purpose easily these days. There are varied ways of making money through photographs these days. Before the emergence of the Internet amateurs did make money as a free launcher. But, with the advent of the Internet the scope for such enthusiasts has widened.

There are three ways of earning money from photographs. First, the photographs can be sold at the stock photography websites. This is a way to share photos and sell them on line. Stock photography websites collect the photographs that can be given licensed for their usages for different purposes. A large number of magazines, ad agencies, publishers, designers and artists visit such sites in search of the photographs they are looking for. They generally go for these sites because hiring professional photographers for their purposes entails a lot of money. In this kind of sharing the photographs that are shot by an individual belongs exclusively to the respective individual and the photographs are copyrighted to the individual. In other words, if a purchaser wants to buy a photograph that is copyrighted to you the purchaser shall have to pay you for that photograph. The most striking advantage of such a business is that the copyright owner can sell his photographs time and again.

[“Hot Stocks” is a new Money Morning feature that analyzes the investment outlook of global companies that are in the news. This is the eighth installment of this ongoing investment series.]

Money Morning Staff Reports

If you like the car, will you love the company?

When it comes to Ford Motor Co. (F), a Canadian car dealer bet a month’s sales on that premise.

Rose City Ford dealership owner John Chisholm offered 100 shares of Ford stock to anyone who bought a new or used vehicle from the dealership during the month of November, the Windsor Star newspaper reported. Chisholm, the president and general manager of Rose City, said he got the idea from a General Motors Co. (GM) dealership in Texas that offered GM shares for each vehicle sold. So Chisholm opted to try it in Windsor, the Ontario, Canada city where Ford has both a long history and deep community roots.

“What a great way to show our confidence in the company,” Chisholm, who employs 80 at a dealership that his father founded nearly 30 years ago, said in an interview late last week. “We believe the company is going to be around for a long, long time.”

Chisholm was planning to actually buy the shares Monday for customers who bought a vehicle last month. He expects to extend the promotion, should its popularity continue.

“We want as many people with ownership in the company as we can,” said Chisholm, who owns Ford shares himself. “They’ll be going up. This is an incentive that is going to grow.”

Just how big a payoff the incentive deal provides the dealership’s customers will depend on whether Ford is able to turn itself around in the coming months.

Thanks to the ongoing global financial crisis – and stung by the worst sales slump in 25 years – Ford lost $3 billion in the third quarter and now the Dearborn, Mich.-based company and its two other “Big Three” cohorts are pressing both U.S. and Canadian lawmakers for emergency aid. All three are to submit turnaround plans to Congress this week – a requirement if General Motors, Ford and Chrysler Corp., are to receive $25 billion in U.S. government bailout loans.

Some details began to emerge yesterday (Tuesday), according to a report that runs elsewhere in today’s (Wednesday’s) issue of Money Morning. Among other things, Ford is considering the sale of its stake in Volvo as it seeks to raise cash.

Anthony J. “Tony” Faria, a marketing expert who is the co-director of the University of Windsor/DaimlerChrysler Canada Automotive Research and Development Center (ARDC), told the Windsor Star that the Ford promotion was “interesting” and “attention-getting,” even though the present value to customers was less than $300, a small inducement compared to other incentives and rebates.

“I presume Detroit Three dealers probably will be looking for a lot of creative things they can do to improve traffic through their dealerships,” Faria said.

Promotional flyers for what the dealership portrayed as “confidence sale” exhorted local customers to “be a part of history,” proclaiming that “100 shares is the way forward.” Public interest has already been piqued by the inexpensive promotion, which customers say they like because of the potential for a big payoff, the newspaper reported.

“The 100 shares are an absolute bonus,” customer Tina Reed said, just before she drove away from the dealership in a brand-new charcoal-gray Ford Focus. “I keep an eye on the stock market but now I’ll pay a little more attention.”

JP Morgan Chase & Co. (JPM) credit analysts had rated GM’s distressed debt as a “Buy,” noting that the company – known for such brands as Chevrolet and Buick – was likely going to survive.

Interestingly, Ford has a market cap of $6.09 billion – making the company known for bringing forth such innovations as mass production, the Model T and the assembly line more than twice as valuable as GM, the market-share leader (of the U.S. carmakers). Ford had $172.5 billion in sales last year, and $160.1 billion in 2006.

GM had $181.2 billion in sales last year and $205.6 billion in 2006, according to statistics provided by Google Finance. The company right now has a market value of only $2.8 billion.

Shares in the embattled automaker hovered near $30 in 2001, but have nose-dived since that time. GM’s shares closed Monday at $4.59 each, a decline of 65 cents each, or 12.4%. They have traded as high as $29.95 in the past 12 months.

Ford shares closed Monday at $2.55 each, down 14 cents, or 5.2% per share. They’ve traded as high as $8.79 in the past year.

Whether the price will tank or skyrocket in these uncertain times is anybody’s guess but many, including Faria, the marketing expert, believe the stock is poised for a rebound – especially if the U.S. and Canadian governments can agree on a multibillion-dollar bailout package.

I’ve seriously thought about buying a lot of Ford shares at this price because one of two things is going to happen,” Faria said. “Either Ford is going to fail and you’re going to lose all of it or, if Ford doesn’t fail, the shares, at some point, are going to be worth a lot more.”

Faria said Ford was in better shape financially than GM and Chrysler, but conceded that the fates of all three are intertwined because they share suppliers dependent on business from all three – and because of the need for government aid.

Not everyone sees a bright future for Ford. Indeed, one Web site wag wrote on the Windsor Star Web site that “I have some Penn Central, WorldCom., Enron, Nortel (NT) and Citibank (C) shares if Mr. Chisholm would like to take them in trade for a new car. They are in certificate form, so he can use them to decorate the showroom. Cheaper than buying new wallpaper.”

To read more click here.

Investment News

Alternately known as “stocks” or “equities,” the term “shares” most accurately describes what you acquire when you invest in a company: When you buy “shares,” you gain ownership in your company-of-choice. Therefore, you have influence over its growth and direction-at least to the extent that you vote at company meetings; and, to some extent, you affect the company’s day-to-day operation. “Share,” of course, is not just a noun; it’s also a verb, which here means that you share in the company’s fortunes. When your business turns a profit, you receive dividends and the value of your equity rises. When your business falls a little short of its forecasts or loses a little of its market share, you may forfeit your dividend, watching the value of your stock decline.

Prudent investors steadfastly follow one cardinal principle: Buy and hold! Stock traders who buy and sell as frequently as schoolgirls change outfits have far more in common with gamblers than with businessmen. And experience shows that stock market gamblers typically fare about as well as mediocre players at an all-pro poker table. If all of a company’s leading indicators do not support your decision to risk your money on the enterprise’s continued growth, you should look for a more promising investment. All share dealers will remind you that past performance is not an assurance of future performance. But if a company’s share price steadily has risen over several decades, you reasonably may infer that it will continue to rise.

Business ventures “quicken,” taking on lives of their own; it’s in their nature to grow and evolve. Conservative long-term investors will risk their money only on “mature” companies which have fulfilled their potential and remained at the top of their industries. Moderate risk-takers will look for companies just beginning to flourish, seeing that their shares steadily have risen in value as the company has grown its market share and increased its profits. All share prices will fluctuate over the short term. A minor dip in share prices means very little. When share prices steadily decline, however, prudent investors acknowledge they should sell.

Not every stock market axiom applies in the real world. Just about everybody can explain the “risk-reward ratio”: the greater the risk, the greater the reward, the saying goes. It goes far better for poker hands than for stocks, though. In the late 1990’s, all internet start-up companies seemed both promising and risky. In 99% of cases, the risk far outweighed the promise, because the “dot-coms” produced no useful, durable goods. Although a company’s production of desirable products dramatically reduces the risk you take when you invest in that company, it typically increases your reward. Even a cursory examination of today’s NYSE or FTSE share prices will show that British Petroleum and other energy producers, the companies with today’s most desirable products, still have the highest values. Similarly, even in the throes of worldwide economic despair, shares of Rolls-Royce have held their value, while shares of promising solar energy companies have tumbled.